> Why do you think 6500/7600 doesn't have the required
> performance ? 30 Mpps Sup 2 with fabric-enabled
> line-cards can perform incredibly well... Having FlexWAN
> and other non-fabric line-cards will slow down to 15
> Mpps, which is usually enough. VLAN L3 interfaces are
> required only on CatOS (which is today required by POS
> modules, unfortunately), but not on Supervisor IOS.

Those are advertised numbers, best-case assuming flows that
can be distributed away from the MSFC. My experience with
Cisco in the past is they rarely get close to advertised
numbers, YMMV. Not that even 30Mpps (15Gb/s) is adequate for
a GigE aggregation device, and 15Mpps (7Gb/s) is not enough.

Even then, other vendors are advertising on the order of
50-90Mpps in the same size chassises, and at least in my lab
they are achieving that. For the same price or less than
6500, lots less than 7600. And larger chassises are avaiable
doing on the order of 150Mpps.

In my experience, service providers that are doing lots of
L3 GigE are not using 6500's or other Cisco products, at
least for GigE services. 6500 is still strong in the L2 GigE
space. With 10GigE, Cisco is even less appealing. SONET is a
different story, of course.